It would be fitting to honor that international effort by giving a Peace Prize to Linus Torvalds, perhaps in 2011 on the 20th anniversary of the August 1991 Linux announcement, or in 2012 on the 50th anniversary of Pauling's award.

I have a degree in Economics, however, I have never actually worked as an Economist. I am still interested though, and religiously read all the reports on the Fed, the business section of the newspaper, and once a year, the winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics.

"The FFII congratulates Eric S. Maskin, an economist who has long criticised the patenting of software, for receiving the 2007 Nobel Prize for Economics. Prof. Maskin and two colleagues receive the Prize for research into the optimal design of economic mechanisms.

"Eric S. Maskin has just been awarded the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, often called Nobel Prize in Economics. [...] But Eric S. Maskin may be known to readers of this blog for another reason. He is the co-author of the landmark 2000 Bessen-Maskin paper on the relationship between sequential innovation, patents and investment in R&D.

When you think of world peace, besides the obvious response by Miss Universe contestants, worthy Laureates come to mind such as Kofi Annan, Medecins Sans Frontieres, Desmond Tutu, Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr. Some sectors of the Internet would like to see Linus Torvalds added to the list.

"On the 16th of may 2007, Richard Stallman gave a speech on the subject of Free Software and Beyond: Human Rights in the Use of Software and Other Published Works..."

To me writing code is a means of Free Speech, and the Free Software movement is about preserving my rights of Free Speech in the face of the US patent system which is trying to cut down what I can say. Attacking the Oracle patent claims, and writing software to undermine their market position is the least I can do. If enough people think and do the same, I hope we can cause them trouble.

«...Control has replaced Free Speech in Stallman’s the rhetoric. This is one of the most noticeable things I took away from today, that there has been a cultural shift from the way proponents of Free Software talk and communicate about the ideas and rationalities of Free Software principles.

Text-to-Speech Software for Linux: If you've been using Mac OS X or Windows Vista before, you may be a bit disappointed to learn that there's no speech synthesizer or text-to-speech (TTS) application that is installed by default on your Linux distribution. For those of you who don't know what a speech synthesizer is, it's simply a computer program that converts normal language text into speech.